I thought this was going to be a simple thing but I am lost somewhere. I am hoping someone can lead me in the right direction.

I have a text file that has a list of numbers and names.

I wanted a sed/awk script that looked for a first instance of a name, then replaced it, then gave me the number.

So I used
grep OPEN file.txt | sed -n '1p;' | awk -F: '{ print $1 }'

That worked but it does not save to the file.txt. So I wanted to get rid of the grep and be able to save the result to the file.txt

anyone...anyone...

Thomas

Please provide a sample of the contents in the file "file.txt" and also what you would like to be replaced and a solution shall be found

BRGs

You need to redirect your output somewhere to save it...

grep OPEN file.txt | sed -n '1p;' | awk -F: '{ print $1 }' > newFile

There are a lot of unnecessary pipes in your command, you could actually do the whole lot in sed or awk.

I can guess the awk solution from what you have posted...

awk -F":" '/OPEN/ {print $1; exit}' yourFile > newFile

And the sed solution will be something like this...

sed -n '/OPEN/{x;/1stValueIsFound/{;x;q;}
s/^.*/1stValueIsFound/;x;s/:.*//;p;}' yourFile > newFile

I prefer the awk because it it is far easier to read and you can tell it to exit once a match has been found.

For sed, you have to keep a value in the holdspace to check against to see if the match has been found ('1stValueIsFound'). You have to keep reading the file unfortunately.

Damian